Missing Thread

Does anyone know why my thread titled "2015 Snorkeling Photos" is missing? I posted it in the "Photo & Video Gallery" section of the forum on (or around) June 29th, 2015, and I added photos to it as recently as mid-December. I don't know when it first disappeared. I just noticed today.

I think this is probably an unrelated event to the 'server failure' or whatever when we had the big crash and everyone became "Guest_*********_", but a lot of threads and posts went missing after that as well. For instance, Michael, you and Erica had well over 3,000 posts before that, and now you're each under that number. Did part of the data/memory?/information saved on the forum get damaged or permanently lost during that event that could explain the lost posts?

We did not believe at the time that we lost posts. But I guess it is possible. I did go back and delink Isaac with the Guest******** account that was him. Hoping that would help, but still didn't find the post.

There is no way I know of to do that en masse but I can do them as a one off. Have done a few people when we had investigations or issues.

The thread had 3-4 pages of photos and discussion including my early spring photos, OK convention photos, Casper visit photos, Balmorhea photos, and Fossil Creek photos. The last activity I remember was when I posted a couple "bad" photos (blurry bluenose and rainbow shiners) as a joke in response to a comment by Josh. That was on December 21st 2015, and there were a few more comments after that.

I doubt this had anything to do with the forum-wide problems of November 2014, since this just happened sometime within the last 2 months. Plus, like Michael said, I don't think we lost forum content with that other problem. I think that was a username/password problem, and therefore members were disconnected from the authorship of their previous posts.

The loss of this thread is disappointing to me. With forum use in decline, a big reason that I continue to make an effort to share things like this on the forum is because they will show up in google search results for years to come. I view it as a form of long-term outreach more so than simply sharing things with current forum users. For example, a google search for the words snorkelbuffaloriver results in a forum thread I made back in 2011 showing up as the second result. That's really high, so it has a good chance of getting clicked on. In this way, good forum threads can have relevance for years to come and have the potential to be a gateway for newcomers to first learn about NANFA and to gain a greater appreciation of native fishes. A google search is how I found out about NANFA myself, though it was results from the email list since that was before the forum was created.

Anyway, thanks for trying to help guys. I appreciate it. It sounds like it's just gone and cannot be recovered. It would be nice to at least know why, but I understand if no one knows. Hopefully this is just a one-time glitch, but it makes me wonder if this sometimes happens and nobody notices?

EDIT: dsuperman's post has me a little more worried that this issue may be more widespread. It would be unfortunate if we are losing forum content. I have gotten valuable information from old threads many times.

I am not convinced that forum usage is down (it was in December but seems to have recovered somewhat based on some recent evaluation I did. But I do agree that the forum is an archive of stuff... heck that is one reason why it is so much better than a f243b*0k page... it is searchable and is saved.

I am going to get with Sajjad and Matt and maybe even our web hosting people and see if we can understand this better.

Those links were very helpful. I can see in the SQL server database that these two thread IDs are missing (the rest of them are sequential numbers. I am going to see what we can maybe do to restore a specific thread now that we have a clear identification. I am also going to see if I can determine if (or how many) other threads are missing.

Hi Denis. Your thread is gone, but google happens to still have a version of it that was saved on January 7th. To see this "cached" version, click on the small arrow to the right of the URL in the search results. Here's an image showing how to do it: http://www.guplum.co...from-Google.jpg. This cached version is only temporary. It will eventually get deleted too (which is the case with my missing thread).